These Jim Thorpe Stats Are Still Unreal

Before Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders, there was Jim Thorpe. Thorpe starred in football, baseball, and Olympic track and field. He had such an amazing athletic career that his name still defines excellence almost 70 years after his death in 1953.

Thorpe was also an important part of Native American culture as a member of the Sac and Fox Nation. While he made history, reaching the highest of highs, he also suffered the lowest of lows. It’s why he continues to be a source of inspiration. Not just during November’s Native American Indian Heritage Month (which celebrates the contributions of Native people), but every day.

The Jim Thorpe stats and facts don’t lie. They tell the story of the greatest athlete of all time. And the legend of this champion keeps getting bigger. 

In 1982, perhaps the greatest disservice in the history of Olympic competition was finally corrected. It was the end of a 70-year journey that began at the Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1912, when American athlete Jim Thorpe won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon, only to see those medals taken away after the International Olympic Committee discovered he played semi-pro baseball for as little as $2 per day. 

Seven decades later and after years and years of debate and arguments on Thorpe’s behalf, the IOC finally did the right thing and gave Thorpe’s family his gold medals back. 

Thorpe, who died in 1953 at the age of 65, never saw his return to Olympic glory. 

“I felt a certain cynicism, that he didn’t get it before (he died),” said actor Burt Lancaster, who portrayed Thorpe in “Jim Thorpe — All-American,” a 1951 film. “What the hell does it mean now? There’s a feeling of bitterness, that it didn’t get done in its own time.” 

Like any great legend, the beginning of Jim Thorpe’s life is shrouded in mystery and carries almost a supernatural air to it. 

Thorpe’s date of birth is the first big mystery. He and his twin brother, Charlie, were born on either May 22, 1887, or May 28, 1887, in Indian Territory close to Prague, Oklahoma, to an Irish-Sac and Fox father, Hiram Thorpe, and a French-Potawatomi mother, Charlotte Vieux. There was no birth certificate to confirm the date. 

Thorpe, who eventually was baptized Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe in the Catholic church, was given the Native name Wa-Tho-So-Huk by his parents. The name means “path lit by great flash of lightning” or “light after the lightning” and sometimes is misinterpreted as “The Bright Path.”

It was said that lightning strikes lit up the path to the cabin he was born in leading up to his birth. Sac and Fox customs dictate that a child be given a name that reflects circumstances surrounding their birth. 

Thorpe’s twin brother, Charlie, helped him make his way through a rebellious streak during their schoolboy days at the Sac and Fox Indian School. Then tragedy struck Thorpe’s life for the first time. Charlie died after a bout with pneumonia when he was only 9 years old. 

Thorpe began a pattern of running away from school and home after Charlie’s death, and his father eventually sent him to the Haskell Institute, an Indian boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas. 

When Thorpe was 14 years old, his beloved mother, Charlotte, died during childbirth. Her death sent him into a spiral of depression, and after an argument with his father, he ran away from home to work at a horse ranch. 

In 1904, Thorpe returned home to his father when he was 16 years old and decided to enroll at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The flagship Indian boarding school in the United States at the time served elementary school through college-aged students. 

At Carlisle, Thorpe had his first brush with greatness when he came into contact with Carlisle football coach Glenn “Pop” Warner, who quickly recognized Thorpe’s athletic talents. 

Thorpe wasn’t long for Carlisle when he received news that his father, Hiram, had died of gangrene poisoning after an injury in a hunting accident. 

Thorpe, now an orphan, left school and disappeared into a life of ranch work once again.